Exploring Effective Methods of Assessing University Students Amidst AI Usage

Abstract

The research explored the effective methods that lecturers and educators can employ to assess university students, in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. The field of artificial intelligence has been rapidly growing. The rapid growth has wrought interactive tools such as ChatGPT, a text based interactive tool that generates human like responses based on user text input. ChatGPT was launched not so long ago, in November 2022 but has attracted millions of users, world over. Chatbots like ChatGPT are able to give responses to complex essay questions, programming problems and even business ideas in a way that mimics the student writing the response on their own. Lecturers and educators now have to rethink and restructure the type of assessments that they assign to students. The traditional methods of assessing university students might not produce the intended results according to set university pedagogical goals. Students’ use of AI chatbots to write answers to assessments given by educators has the greatest potential to negatively impact key academic areas such as critical thinking, development of research skills, and becoming a lifelong learner. Hence the need for an exploration of approaches, strategies, techniques and methods to assess students amidst the usage of artificial intelligence tools. The research involved an extensive literature review on the subject followed by collection of qualitative data on the views of both educators and learners from universities in Ndola, Zambia. The study population comprised two universities in Ndola, from which a sample size of 25 participants was drawn, based on attaining saturation point. The research findings could benefit university faculty as they will have a guide on what type of assessments to assign students and how to evaluate student responses. In addition, other non-academic institutions that create assessments could also find the findings useful in that they may be assessing individuals who might be versed with artificial intelligence tools. Higher education policies can be formulated based on the findings of this research.